Valley boxing champ gets her stolen belts back, thanks to LAPD

There were three things Jennifer Grooms really missed when a burglar struck her Mission Hills home last year.

One was tiny, not much bigger than a fingernail: the SIM card from her camera, which held the photos documenting her pregnancy.

The other two were massive: her jewel-encrusted gold boxing championship belts.

The photos seem gone for good. But last week, the champ got her belts back.

The Los Angeles Police Department said the case was cracked when a fingerprint match tied the break-in to a repeat offender and undocumented immigrant named Jose Pedraza.

When police searched Pedraza's house in Sylmar on Friday, the belts were at the bottom of a hamper under the 20-year-old's dirty clothes, LAPD Detective William Cooper said.

The same day, police gave the belts back to a grateful and surprised Grooms, who was Jennifer Barber during her boxing career.

"I thought they were long gone," she said.

Grooms, a 30-year-old San Fernando Valley native, went to Kennedy High in Granada Hills and Cal State-Northridge. She won nine belts as an amateur, according to the North American Boxing Federation.

In 2003, she became the first woman from Los Angeles County to win a National Golden Gloves championship. After turning pro, she won belts from the NABF and the International Female Boxers Association.

She got the latter belt, for her super featherweight title, after a 2010 fight in South Korea. She retired in 2011, and the break-in happened March 20, 2012. The thief took jewelry, electronics and the belts, which were on display in the home. He even stole diapers.

"He almost sent me into early labor, I was so upset," said Grooms, who was seven months pregnant at the time.

A detective asked whether she wanted the house fingerprinted, but cautioned that getting results could take years and might lead nowhere.

Grooms thought about buying replacement belts, but it didn't seem right to have to buy something she'd earned. To her, the belts were symbols of the decade she spent fighting her way to the top in a sport that's not always welcoming to women.

Out of the blue, Grooms got a call from a detective recently: There had been a fingerprint hit. The long lag before the fingerprint hit reflected the LAPD's testing backlog, which Cooper said has begun to ease with better civilian staffing.

The suspect, Pedraza, turned out to have committed at least two other burglaries in Mission Hills since December 2011, Cooper said.

When Pedraza was arrested in one of those earlier break-ins, he was doing community service for drunken driving by working at the Mission police station. He would have been deported to Mexico if not for the newest arrest.

Cooper said the resolution was "bittersweet" since police couldn't find the SIM card and Grooms' and her husband's wedding rings.

Before they were returned to their rightful owner, the belts took a brief tour of the police station. Cooper said each seemed about as heavy as an officer's gun belt.

"Several of the detectives in the squad room held them up, thought we were Rocky," he said.